Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [30]
And so, the first and second years, 1692 and ’93, while Gabriel traveled the Orient, barely surviving storms off the Cape, pirates in Madagascar, an uprising by the bedraggled and degraded dwellers of St. Helena, where an earlier governor had notched the ears of malcontents and threatened to do the same to sailors, Hannah polished her correspondence, observed the world that passed outside her cottage, tended her garden, content, too, with the harmonious arrangement of houses and gardens all around her and with the tidiness of the meadows and the shallow placidity of the little ponds just beyond—and fell, briefly, in love.
So content, in fact, that she did not suffer the despondency that is as much the prelude to as the aftermath of a wayward passion.
11
THE NEWS of Gabriel Legge’s death arrived loudly and irreverently with a toss of gravel on her sleeping-room window. “Widow Legge, a message.” A large, obviously seafaring young man, inebriated but sociable, startled her at dawn as she was poking the grate to light her morning fire. His bulky, uneven body blocked the door frame. He had obviously slept aboard his ship, and the fumes of close companionship and nighttime rum had not yet lifted.
“Widow Legge?”
She blocked the word. The name was not uncommon. Up close she could see he was far younger than his deformities—congenital, vocational and accidental—had made him. Probably her own age, younger than Gabriel, but toothless, ill-fed, with the tops of his ears practically serrated from so many penal notchings.
“I am the wife of Gabriel Legge,” she answered.
“Then double’s the loss, I warrant.”
He dangled a familiar purse in front of him and dropped its heavy, metallic contents in her hand. For the first time she actually believed the unthinkable might have occurred. It was Gabriel’s.
“A good chap, brave and decent to his crew. Died defending King and ship’s company agin the Portugee. Most chaps what dies at sea leave nought but brats and a crone behind. A less honorable man would not have gold to dispense, my lady. Many’s the last request that goes unhonored, if you follow my thinking.”
She did, sufficiently, to endow his fidelity, and to safeguard her husband’s good name. “Did you see my Gabriel—at the end?”
“Nae. We, ah, engaged the Portugee ourselves off Zeloan. The captain at pain of a slow dishonorable death divulged the names of East Indiamen and English ships he’d boarded and scuttled and what survived of their crews. None, I fear. He has a cuttlefish for his confessor now.”
Like that, at age twenty-three, she was a widow. Her third “epistle” to the Salem press was on the comforts of widowhood, the acceptance of God’s design, the smaller pleasures of seasonal blooms, on attuning oneself to the cycles of nature, the assurance that one’s husband had served the King bravely, and that his contributions and honor had been loyally engraved in the collective memory.
The letter lacks the bite of the other two. At the very moment of dramatic grief, of total loss, Hannah’s spirit failed her. It is a letter no different from any of its time, eloquent and predictable. She had moved on.
AS HER EPISTLES to Salem indicate, she’d never led an entirely solitary existence during the months of Gabriel’s absence at sea. I have no doubt of her chastity in the conventional sense; her years in England may have corresponded to the era of Restoration comedy, but Stepney was far outside the drawing rooms of fops and dandies. She confined herself to the bleak society of her fellow Stepney brides, the doctors, the emigrants and repatriates who sought her out for nostalgia’s sake. But now, as befitted her new role of widow, she did withdraw completely.
When temptation struck, it would approach by stealth, consistent with